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Dr Robert Berg, chief of Critical Care Medicine at the hospital, said: 'These findings about the duration of CPR are game-changing, and we hope these results will rapidly affect hospital practice.'

Resuscitation: Part of the CPR process often involves the use of a shock using an automated external defibrillator (AED)

The overall results from the children's study follows an adult study of 64,000 patients with in-hospital cardiac arrests between 2000 and 2008 by experts from the same research group.

Patients at hospitals where CPR was likely to persist for 25 minutes on average had a 12 per cent higher chance of surviving cardiac arrest, compared to patients at hospitals where CPR duration was shortest, at around 16 minutes on average.

Survivors of prolonged CPR had similar neurological outcomes in terms of brain function to those who survived after shorter CPR efforts.

The conventional thinking has been that the technique is futile after 20 minutes, but Dr Berg said these results challenge that assumption.

The next steps for CPR researchers are to identify important risk and predictive factors that determine which patients may benefit most from prolonged CPR, and when CPR efforts have become futile, he added.